Anonymous Rex (7 page)

“You can go up now,” says the nurse, and though I’m glad to scoot away from her scowl, that stale gum sure did smell like the finest ambrosia.

As I ride the elevator to the fifth floor, I can only guess at the commotion taking place up there right now. Nurses are scuttling the patients into safe areas, room doors are being closed and bolted. It’s like lockdown at County, but without the convicts and much prettier guards. As an unknown entity, I represent a potential threat, and all signs of dinosaur existence must be hidden as best as possible. Cameras and still shots of my approach are of no use; with costumes as realistic as they are these days, there’s only one foolproof way of distinguishing a human from a dino in human garb—our smell.

Dinosaurs spew out pheromones like an out-of-control oil well, gushing out gases 24-7-365. The basic dino scent is a sweet one, at least, a fresh stroke of pine on a crisp autumn morning, with just a hint of sour swamp mist thrown in for good measure. As well, each of
us has our own individual scent intertwined with the dino odor, an identifying mark roughly equivalent to human fingerprints. I have been told that mine smells like a fine Cuban stogie, half-chewed, half-smoked. Ernie’s was like a ream of carbon paper, fresh off the ditto machine; sometimes I think I can still smell him walking by.

But thanks to the layers of makeup, rubber, and polystyrene with which my species is forced to cover up our natural beauty each and every day, it now often takes close quarters—three, four feet—before a dino can be completely sure with which sentient member of the animal kingdom he is dealing. Thus the precautions on Ward F will continue until I am thoroughly checked out, olfactory and otherwise, by the nursing staff.

The elevator doors slide open. I was right—rooms are locked up tight, silence reigns, and the ward is as empty as the last Bay City Rollers concert I went to. Good show, by the way. A solitary nurse lies in wait behind her station, pretending to read a mass-market paperback. She’s in the guise of a well-stacked blonde, and even though I’m not attracted to the human female form, hourglass or otherwise, I can tell through the costume that this dino’s got one great infrastructure.

Not wanting to cause any further delay, I glide up to the desk, pirouette, and bare the back of my ears, allowing the nurse to get a good snifferoo of my manly, manly scent. Once, in a drunken stupor, I tried this disco spin on a human woman and got slapped as a result, though to this day I still can’t figure out exactly what part of the gesture could be construed as obscene.

“He’s clean!” calls the nurse, and the room doors fall open in rapid succession, spreading out like dominoes from the center of the ward. Patients spill into the corridors, grumbling as one about the incessant security checks. Beneath flimsy hospital gowns, I can see tails swishing, spikes glistening, claws scratching, and for a brief moment I fantasize about becoming a patient on Ward F, if only so that I might live for a few days in this milieu of personal freedom.

The nurse notices my wistful look. “You gotta be sick to get in,” she says.

“I almost wish I were.”

“I could break your arm,” she jokes, and I politely decline the offer.
It would be wonderful—truly, positively magical—to tear free from my girdles and my clamps and lounge around as the Velociraptor that I am for a few days of blithe self-acceptance, but I have to draw the line somewhere, and that somewhere is physical pain.

“I see it all the time,” the nurse continues, reading my thoughts. “Gets so we’ll do anything just to be ourselves.”

“What would you do?” I ask, flipping on my internal flirtation switch. I have a job to take care of, I know, but Burke’s not going anywhere, and he can wait a minute or two while I turn up the charm.

The nurse shrugs and leans into the desk. “What would I do? I don’t know,” she says, raising her eyebrows suggestively. “Breaking an arm can be pretty painful.”

“My thoughts exactly.”

She thinks, tosses her faux hair across one shoulder. “I could catch a cold.”

“Too easy,” I say. “And it won’t land you in the hospital.”

“A really bad cold?”

“You’re on to something.”

“My goodness, not a disease!” she yelps in mock terror.

“A minor one, perhaps.”

“It would have to be curable.”

I nod, draw in closer. “Eminently curable.” We’re inches apart.

The nurse clears her throat seductively, leans in even farther, and says, “There are some pretty benign social diseases running rampant out there.”

After I have secured her home phone number, I head toward Burke’s semiprivate suite, fourth door down on my left. All manner of patients, undaunted by my presence, shuffle by wordlessly as I saunter down the hall. There are wounds wrapped in bandages, IV bags attached to arms, tails tied up in traction, and everyone is understandably more preoccupied with their own current state of health than the appearance of yet another stranger on an already crowded hospital ward.

The wipe-off placard on the room door bears the names of Mr. Burke and his temporary roommate, one Felipe Suarez, and I poke my head through the open doorway, making sure to plaster a wide smile onto my face. There are two kinds of witnesses in this world:
those who respond to smiles, and those who respond to shakedowns. I’m hoping Burke is the first kind, ’cause I don’t like to get physical if I don’t have to, and I haven’t socked anyone for the last nine months; it’d be nice to keep the streak going. Plus, I’d be violating some pretty serious Emily Post rules by browbeating a hospitalized Velociraptor.

But there’s no need to worry about that yet—the beds have been cordoned off by pull-along curtains, my only view into the room blocked by a pair of gauzy white sheets lazily flapping back and forth like flags of surrender in the breeze from an overhead fan. An open closet showcases two empty guises strung up on hangers, a pair of deflated human bodies sagging to the disinfected ground.

“Mr. Burke?” I call.

No answer.

“Mr. Burke?”

“He sleeping,” comes a drugged-up, drawn-out voice from the left side of the room.

I quietly tiptoe inside, crawling closer to the covered hospital bed. The small silhouette behind the curtain—Mr. Suarez, I assume—emits a grunt like an old Chevy V-8 straining to turn over as he attempts to prop himself up.

“Any idea when he’ll wake?” I ask. There is no sound from Burke’s side of the room. Not a peep, not a snore.

“Who wake?”

“Mr. Burke. Any idea when he’ll wake up?”

“You got chocolate?”

Of course I don’t have chocolate. “Sure I got chocolate.”

The shadow coughs, scoots higher in the bed. “C’mere,” it says. “You pull back curtain, give me chocolate, we talk.”

I can’t think of a single dinosaur I know who likes the flavor of chocolate. Our taste buds aren’t equipped to handle the rich textures of such rough-and-tumble delicacies, and though we’ve learned over time to ingest all manner of fatty substances, carob and its cousins have never been high on our acquired taste list. Then again, certain dinos will eat anything. With an inkling of what’s in store for me (Lord, I hope I’m wrong), I tentatively pull back the curtain …

Suarez is a Compy. I knew it. And now I have to converse with the creature. This should take a good six or seven hours.

“So?” he asks, his withered, frail arms slowly spreading wide. “Where chocolate?”

Suarez is uglier than most Compys I’ve seen, but it’s probably a result of whatever illness he’s managed to contract. His hide is a mess of speckled greens and yellows, and I can’t decide whether or not it’s an improvement over his race’s usual feces-pile brown. Multiple pockmarks scar his flexible beak, small rotting blemishes that remind me of the antique, moth-ravaged clothing wasting away in my spare closet. And his voice—that voice!—shades of the tow truck driver, with a side of helium ingestion.

“Hey, where chocolate?” he squawks, and I have to suppress an urge to stifle the bearer of those vocal cords with a pillow. It would be so easy.

“Chocolate comes later,” I say, slipping farther away from the bed. “First you tell me about Burke.”

“Chocolate first.”

“You talk first.”

The Compy sulks. I stand my ground. He sulks some more. I whistle. He bangs his feeble fists against the bed railing, and I yawn widely, showcasing my excellent dental hygiene.

“Okay,” he says, “what you want to know?”

“What time does Burke wake up?” I ask.

“He not wake up.”

“I know he’s not awake now. I mean how long does he usually sleep?”

“He always sleep.”

Enough of this. I reach into my pocket and pretend to grab something approximately Snickers-sized. Holding my (empty) hand aloft, I shrug at Suarez. “Guess you don’t get your chocolate,” I say. Man, sometimes you gotta treat these schmucks like babies.

“No no no no no!” he screams, a shrill note climbing higher and louder than the greatest alto castrato of them all could ever hope to achieve. Water glasses should be bursting all around the greater metropolitan area.

Once my eardrums have taken down their storm shutters, I lean over toward Burke’s bed and perk up my pinnas. Nothing. Not a twitter. And after that precious bit of cacophony … well, maybe he really doesn’t wake up.

“Are you saying that Burke is in a coma?” I ask Suarez.

“Yep,” he says. “Coma. Coma. Chocolate?”

Ah, hell.… Why didn’t Dan mention this to me when we were at the club?

“Chocolate?”

With no worries that I’ll wake my witness, I step across the room and peek behind Donovan Burke’s protective curtain. Bad move. The smell of a human Thanksgiving feast comes on strong, the heady scents of smoked ham and roasted turkey slamming into my sinuses. Then I see the bandages, caked in blood—the flesh, rippled and torn from the flames—the sores, the gashes, pus oozing like custard—my eyes glued to the charred husk that this poor Raptor, so similar to myself in size and shape, has become.

Minutes later I come to, my knees wobbly, my hands trembling. Somehow, I have managed to remain upright, and somehow I have managed to close the curtain. Against the gauze now there is only a still, tired shadow that may or may not be the ravaged, comatose body of Donovan Burke. And though I’m glad to be staring at a blank white canvas once again, I find in myself the perverse desire to rip the sheet aside and soak in another look, as if by burning the effects of such an accident into my brain I could prevent it from ever happening to me. But Suarez’s insistent whine pulls me from my reverie.

“Chocolate!”

“Does he … does he ever talk?” I ask.

“Oh yeah, he talk sometime,” says the Compy. “Real loud. Loud loud.”

Then he’s not in a coma. I choose not to educate Suarez on the distinction. “What he sa—what
does
he say?” The last thing I want out of this adventure is to fall into Compy-speak.

“He call names,” Suarez tells me. “He call out Judith, Judith, and then he moan. Real loud.”

“Judith?”

“And he call out J.C.!”

“J.C.? Like the initials?”

“Judith, Judith!” Suarez bursts into laughter, spittle drenching his bedsheets. “J.C.! Judith!”

I run a hand through my faux hair, a gesture I picked up when I was just a kid still learning how to act like the consummate human.
It is a nonverbal signal intended to indicate frustration, or so I have been told, and I’ve been unable to purge it from my body-language lexicon. “What else does he say? Go on.”

“He cry for Mama sometime,” Suarez says beneath his breath, as if revealing the secrets of the ages, “and other time he just cry Judith! Judith!”

I figure now’s as good a time as any to start writing this stuff down.
Cries out for Judith
goes right on top, if only because the Compy won’t shut up about it.
J.C
. is second,
Mama
is third. So sorry, Mama.

“Has he had any visitors?” I ask.

“I have visitors!” Suarez screeches, and proceeds to showcase the array of three-by-five photos that are scattered about his night table. Some are legitimate pictures of other Compys, small, wiry creatures clearly related to Mr. Felipe Suarez, while others are a tad more suspect—snapshots of good-looking Stegosaurs and Brontos, most likely photo-frame models whose pictures have yet to be removed from their holders.

“That’s lovely,” I say. “Very nice.” I close my eyes, and … yep, there it is again, another migraine working its way down the tracks. I take a deep breath and speak slowly. “I want to know if he—Mr. Burke—the Raptor in the bed over there—has had any visitors.”

“Oh,” says Suarez, blinking rapidly. “Oh.”

“You understand?”

“Oh. Yes. Yes.”

“Yes he has had visitors, or yes you understand?”

“Yes visitors. One. One visitor.”

Finally. “Was it a relative? A friend?”

Suarez cocks his head to one side, like a dog wondering
when are you going to throw the damn Frisbee already
, and a smile comes to a slow boil across his beak.

“Who was it?” I ask. “Did you hear a name?”

“Judith!” he cries, breaking into peals of laughter. “Judith, Judith, Judith!”

I storm out, Suarez’s singsong ringing in my ears. Whole trip’s been a goddamned waste of time, pretty much the end product of any endeavor in which a Compy is involved. I consider asking my newfound nursing friend—her name is Rita, and she’s an Allosaur, va-voom!—
for Burke’s visitor records. I know she’d do it for me, despite its questionable legality, but I don’t want to get her into trouble. At least not yet, not without me, and certainly not sober.

But I give her a little head bob, a catch-you-later nod, as I walk by, and she winks back. “You may want to restrict all chocolates from Mr. Suarez’s diet,” I suggest, residual anger stemming from the Compy’s uselessness breaking through my usual reluctance to cause distress to the infirm. “He’s lookin’ pretty hyper.” I step backward into the elevator.

Rita bites her lower lip—ah Lord, she knows the moves, and it’s driving me crazy just to look at the doll—and says, “Are those doctor’s orders?”

“Better,” I reply. “They’re Vincent’s orders.” The doors slide closed and I congratulate myself on being one smoooooth reptile.